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Dogen’s Return to Japan: Roshi Norman Fischer

So, Dogen came back to Japan. He was still pretty young; he was in his twenties. And he began practicing, now not as a Tendai monastic, but instead as a Zen person. It was the beginning of Zen as an independent school in Japan. And this was a dangerous thing because the Tendai establishment didn’t really like that some monastics were saying, “I’m no longer Tendai I’m now a Zen person, and I’m not doing Zen as a part of a Tendai Buddhist program of study, I’m doing Zen as the only practice that I need.” This was very threatening to the Tendai establishment, so they gave Dogen quite a bit of trouble throughout the rest of his life. Eventually, he moved to what then was a pretty faraway mountainous place where he established the monastery that still exists as one of the headquarters monasteries of Soto Zen: it’s called Eihei-ji.

It’s a wonderful place to visit; it still operates quite beautifully. It’s, I think, the most beautiful temple in Japan. It’s always had about 100 or so monastics and residents; of course, it’s Japan so that means all men, no women. But women can visit… Dogen, by the way, had women disciples. It’s not clear whether they lived in Eihei-ji at the time that he was there, but he certainly did have women disciples, we know that. And one of his most famous writings is a surprisingly forthright and very tuperative complaint about male monastics who are incapable of recognizing the attainment of women monastics. He takes them to task in this essay and really lets them have it, which is really quite astonishing in 1240, or whenever it was he wrote that. You wouldn’t think that there was a single man on the planet, in the field of religion, who would’ve said that, but Dogen actually did.

Anyway, he came back to Japan, and his feeling was: I want to transmit what I have learned from Rujing to my brothers and sisters in Japan because Japan has been struggling all this time to really understand Buddhism, and I don’t think we’ve understood it. But now, this really does satisfy our needs and our desires for real peace, so I want to share this. As I say, he got a lot of trouble from the Tendai establishment for this, but he persisted for the rest of his life. It would never have occurred to Dogen to be original, or to be unique, or to find his own voice—these concepts would’ve been absolutely foreign to him. All he was trying to do was exactly transmit what he had learned. But it turned out that he couldn’t help but be original and groundbreaking in his approach.

Excerpted from a dharma talk given at Upaya Zen Center, October 18, 2012, “Awesome Presence: Dogen’s Mountains and Rivers Sutra Part 1.” Listen to the full podcast recording of this talk and the eleven-part Awesome Presence series. Read Part One.Read Part Two.Read Part Three.

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GIVING LIFE TO LIFE: A Spring Retreat from April 3 - 5, 2015.This weekend retreat gives us the rare opportunity to drop into the deep questions related to time, life, death, rebirth, and no birth no death.